[Zambia] Almost 80% of Zambian children face poverty

From The Independent Online South Africa

Lusaka - More than 71 percent of Zambia's six million children live in extreme poverty, a local children's organisation announced on Thursday.

The Zambia Civic Education Association (ZCEA) said children - despite accounting for more than half of the southern African country's 10 million people - were living in deprivation and beyond the reach of development.

ZCEA executive director Judith Mulenga described the condition as critical and called on the government to immediately enact the Child Policy and Action Plan to address their plight. "The government bears the primary responsibility for reaching out to these children," she said.

Hundreds of thousands of children in the country are orphaned, mostly as a direct result of the devastating impact of HIV and Aids, and are left vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

More than 1,1 million children are Aids orphans, while an estimated 90 000 have the disease, and thousands of others are directly vulnerable due to high poverty levels. "All these live in plain view of government and communities but are invisible and excluded from fundamental services and protection," said Mulenga.

According to a Unicef and government report on the status of children, Zambia has amongst the highest proportion of orphans in Sub-Saharan Africa - much higher than any country in Asia, Latin America or the Caribbean.